Obesity, excess caloric intake, insufficient physical activity, or some combination of these factors increases the risk of several important cancers, including colon, post-menopausal breast, endometrial, kidney, and esophageal.

The high prevalence of obesity and physical inactivity is a worldwide public health issue, yet the mechanisms by which energy imbalance and obesity cause cancer remain unclear. We are pursuing several approaches to address these issues, including:

• Improvement of assessment tools for diet, physical activity, and body size, in order to disentangle these interrelated exposures;
• Performance of etiologic studies in high-risk populations (e.g., South Asians);
• Studies of biochemical mechanisms, including the use of high-throughput multiplex assays of possible obesity-related biomarkers (such as inflammatory markers/cytokines, metabolic hormones, and sex hormones).